The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 65: High-Rise Lettuce Farms, and the First Woman President

Episode Date: January 13, 2017

Ian Frazier explores indoor farming; Dan Savage tells David Remnick a thing or two about sex; and Amy Davidson asks, Why Angela Merkel but not Hillary Clinton?   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent. I think it would be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties. There's a sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and it's not clear where it goes next. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

You know those scenarios in which a butterfly flaps its wings or somehow a breeze blows in a certain direction, some inconsequential act, and it changes the course of human history. In one of those scenarios, somehow, Hillary Clinton will take the oath of office on Friday, just not in this universe. We know that although Hillary Clinton won a popular majority

by almost 3 million votes, she lost in the electoral college, and there are all kinds of reasons for that which we don't have to go into. One that we can't deny is that Clinton's gender was an issue. It was an issue. Clearly, some people are not willing, whether they admitted or not, to have a woman lead the country. The New Yorkers Amy Davidson has spent a lot of time this year thinking about the barriers that women face in politics and who the first female chief executive

just might be whenever she arrives. Amy spoke with Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University, which tries to get more women into office. Say a woman comes to you who's sort of on the fence. Give me the 30-second pitch you would give her why she should run for office. The challenges that this country are facing right now are enormous, and we cannot afford to keep half of the talent and the creativity on the sidelines. And we can't just wait every four years for a presidential race to be engaged in the political process. our democracy demands that we are engaged in this process all the time. And there's a wonderful saying that if you're not at the table, you are probably on the menu.

And we need to make sure that women are at the table when policy decisions are being made that affect their lives. I think that politics is still very much gendered space. One of the challenges that we have when we think about women running for the presidency is that by and large, this year being an exception clearly, but by and large, we elect our presidents either from the United States Senate or as from the governors across the country. And right now, there are only 21 women serving in the United States Senate. Or you could think about it. There are 21 women serving in the United States Senate, again, all of whom were, you know, at least where Obama was in terms of senior. already in experience. That's 21. I mean, it's not 50, but it's 21 people who, why isn't each and

every one of them asking, why don't I run for president? Well, we don't know that they're not thinking that. I mean, I think there are. Or why aren't we asking them? Yeah, I think that's probably more the issue. I think there are a few women now who clearly are being talked about. Obviously, Elizabeth Warren is somebody who people are talking about as a potential presidential candidate, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York. There's even been conversations and articles written about Kamala Harris, who just was sworn in into her first term from California, about the potential for her as a presidential candidate. But I think that we have to be realistic that the pool is still relatively small.

On the gubernatorial side, we only have five women governors. And then there are all kinds of considerations, what state they come from, their ability to raise money, whether they want it or not. But a lot of men throw those doubts aside. I just wonder if we should be thinking about the pool as being, you know, seeing it as a, half-full pipeline rather than a half-empty pipeline. I'm often the half-empty person on this subject because I think what's been so frustrating is to watch the numbers below the presidential level move as slowly as they have. So, I mean, we're talking about this election cycle where there was a woman running at the top of the ticket for the very first time in history as a nominee. And we came out of this election with exactly the same number of women in Congress.

We went from 24.5 percent women in state legislatures to 24.8 percent. Now, you said that, you know, we needed to be realistic. But isn't part of the challenge here getting women to be a little unrealistic, or maybe the handicap that women have is that they're too realistic, compared to men, that you need to be a little out there to... Well, I think it would be very hard for a woman who had the level of experience of a Donald Trump to get elected president of the United States. I think about a Carly Fiorina who ran for president on the Republican side.

And I think in many ways you'd have to say. did the strongest debate performance of most of the candidates up there, certainly in many ways stronger than Donald Trump. And he took her on and did a lot of the same kind of playing his gender card with her and the way he had with Jeb Bush and he did with Marco Rubio and he tried it with her. And I think she really took him on in the debate and silenced him in a way that I think there almost nobody else was able to do. But yet it didn't work for. for her being that consummate outsider. I think that it's a real double bind. You know, you need to be the outsider a bit, right, but you still have to prove that you're qualified.

Debbie, let me ask you this. You know, we've talked about this as the tallest, the hardest glass ceiling, but it's a ceiling that's been broken by a lot of other countries around the world, including some that we don't think of being, you know, ahead of us on women's rights. Like, you not just places like Germany and Great Britain, India, Pakistan. Right. Take miracle. You know, she is East German. So until sort of early Middle Age, she was an obscure scientist in East Germany.

And do we need to have more of that just crazed imagination here about how you can change your life by running for office or getting into politics? I think it's one thing if you have the imagination to run and the structure that we have set up in this country, I think, makes it very difficult for that complete outsider, unless perhaps that outsider has billions of dollars at their disposal to put into a campaign. So I think that does make it hard for that real outsider to kind of come in and run for the presidency. So are you saying Cheryl Sandberg should be thinking about running for president? I've been very interested in some of the women who are, and sadly they're not enough of them, right, who are CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies. But to see some of these women who can take kind of that express ramp onto into politics. You know, some of the women who, I don't know if it's to go directly to the presidency, but to go directly to the Senate, to go directly to the House, to not to not necessarily think that you have to run, you know, work your way up. And I think that's actually a myth that, and I think it's something that women are told more often, you know, work your way up.

And so they feel they have to start at the school board level and then maybe run for local municipalities. office and then the state legislature. Now, if you want to be in school board, great. Run for school board. But I sometimes worry that what happens is women will run for school board and municipal office. And frankly, that's some of the toughest work there is to do out there. And they just get burned out and they don't run for anything else.

You know, you can't even go to the grocery store because everybody knows you. They're upset because you're doing something with their kids. So I think we can run the risk of burning women out before they even get started when, in fact, the reality is if the opportunity comes along, if there's an open seat, if you're positioned, if you've been active in the community, you know, go big. Go big, yeah. Amy Davidson, a writer for the New Yorker speaking with Debbie Walsh of Rutgers University. She's the director of the Center for American Women in Politics. George Saunders is the author of countless short stories. He's really one of the great writers of our time

and a huge influence on younger writers. His work is very funny and also very sad. And at the center of it is a deep concern with human morality, how the world constantly gets in the way of our desire to be good spouses, good neighbors, and good colleagues, even good presidents. So I was George Saunders, and I'm in my office at Tully Hall

and the Scenic Syracuse University campus. And right outside my window, behind me, there's a beautiful statue of a seated Lincoln. It's called the Mystic Lincoln. So for the past five years, I've been working on this novel called Lincoln and the Bartow. And this statue has just been kind of a constant reminder that I have that at home to work on. And kind of also a bit of a physical embodiment of the kind of ethos of the book, which is Lincoln kind of at his lowest, you know, the most sad, the most defeated. It's 1862. The war is going terribly. They're just realizing it's not going to be a short thing.

And, you know, his reports are coming back. Oh, thousands of people dead in a single day. And at this moment, his favorite child dies at 11, kind of unexpectedly of typhus. And he was so heart-sick, according to the newspapers at the time, that he actually went back to the graveyard one night alone and held a body. So the book has kind of set on that night. Yeah, so yeah, so his hands are crossed, kind of in his lap, and he looks like he just came from court maybe. He's kind of dressed up, he's got his bow tie on, no beard, and he's sitting with his knees slightly apart, his hands between his knees, and his eyes are cast down at about, you know, a spot a few feet in front of himself in what looks to me kind of like almost like a meditative posture. I've heard that it's the only sad sculpture of Lincoln that exists.

And he looks kind of contemplative and a little sad, a bummed out. Yeah, and he just looks kind of like he's working through something. But maybe, you know, it's funny, there was, you think of the Rodin, the thinker, and that guy is working it. You know, he's kind of hunched over and he looks a little constipated. And this is a different kind of a thinking. He seems to be kind of there, you know, to receive thought, but not, pushing it too hard. You know, he's letting a solution kind of work its way up through himself a little

bit. That's how I see it. I know. He might be asleep, well, I know. In truth, the meaningful thing about this was that he, it was like a physical embodiment of this secret project that for about half the time I wasn't sure would work. So I can remember kind of walking by and going, I'm trying, I'm trying, you know, I'm doing my best. You know, the book is about the night that Lincoln, supposedly Lincoln went to the crypt and held his son's body a couple nights after he was buried. the book sort of became, I guess, an exploration of how do we function when everything's really broken. The country's turned against him. He really is losing the war. So his son died, and it was kind of connected with the party that they had thrown. The kids were sick, and they went ahead with the party anyway.

So when the kid finally did pass away, there was a lot of chatter about the bad parenting of the Lincoln's, the ambition and so on. So your son dies, you have a feeling that you maybe helped it along, maybe. Then you're so grease-tricken you hold the body. Well, the next day he went into the office and he signed some big bill changing the currency or something like that. So he had some way of enduring hardship. And it was really interesting to think about what would one do in that situation where every vestige of defense that you would build up would crumble under your feet. There's nothing he could claim for himself, really. And yet, as we know, he went on. So it was funny how, as the book started to become that story, I would look out and he would be in exactly

the posture that I would imagine him being at the graveyard and exactly in the kind of the frame of mind. He looks a little bit like somebody who's just been beaten at something, you know, just lost something. You know, I never really wanted to write about Lincoln. He's like, who wants to write about Lincoln? It's like writing about Jesus. You know, it's too hard. You know, you're trying to avoid four score and seven minutes ago.

I came into this graveyard, you know. But it's funny how there is, you know, I think one of the reasons people love him. I think it has to do with, he just was, you get the sense anyway. He's just working through these things on a really high moral ethical level by his own lights, you know, which is really something moving about that, that he could change the world just by, reasoning his way through it. The thing, okay, so the thing about Lincoln, that through Mark, will, when you read through that period,

he always seemed to have, in a moment of crisis, to keep his eyes up on the higher things. So, you know, there was a point where things were getting really ugly, a lot of casualties, and no progress either way. So it looked like it'd be a 20-year war of attrition. And there was some talk about a peace deal. And one of the conditions was,

was the emancipation proclamation would be struck down, the slaves would be returned, and he wouldn't do it. It wasn't political, it wasn't expedient, but he had spoken to some of the black veterans who had fought. And he's just like, we can't do it. It's not possible. You know, at a moment when sometimes the eternal verities seem trivial

or they seem impossible, that's the time to double down on them. So if we believe that love is the answer, it is. And if we believe that vigilance is necessary, then it is. I think Twain said, you know, an untested virtue is not a virtue. You know, we like it to be tested in miniature, so we can always win. You know, we can always be confident of who we are. I mean, we don't like ambiguity.

We don't like this feeling right now because it's so uncertain. Not only is an uncertain what's going to happen, but our place in it is uncertain. And I guess what I see in his posture is somebody who knows that there's no autopilot. There's also something about him being all right with how shitty things are at the moment. We're inclined to think that if we're sad, we've messed up or we've lost or we've been shown to be incorrect. But in a lot of Eastern teachings, you know, sadness is that's right. Yeah, you know, you're you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, dying and you're inept while you're here and you're failing at love and why wouldn't you be

sad. George Saunders is the author of several books of short stories and a new novel called Lincoln in the Bardot. He spoke with us from the statue of Lincoln outside his office in Syracuse, New York. Bardo, by the way, is a term I looked it up from Tibetan Buddhism that means something like limbo, a state between life and death. Now we're going to get a little earthier in a minute or a lot earthier, frankly, because I'll be talking with Dan Savage, about 20-some years of writing the sex advice column, Savage Love. Stick around. There's more coming up on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Dan Savage started writing a column called Savage Love over two decades ago for the Seattle

Alt Weekly, The Stranger. He's written several books and has been a very strong voice for LGBTQ rights. Recently, he's become known for reviving was probably the oldest debate in the institution of marriage, whether absolute monogamy is really an achievable goal. Savage Love is nominally a sex advice column, but it's a lot more than that. Dan's readers are asking questions about family, relationships of all configurations and orientations, and of course politics. It's a big tent version of what sex is all about. And while Dan's views and his politics might seem radical to some, he comes out of an old and homey tradition in American newspapers. But I should point out, in case it's not so obvious, we're going to be talking about sex and sexuality. This conversation is for mature audiences.

You just decide who's mature in the room and who's not. Dan, you've been the most unlikely thing for the last 25 years. You've been an advice columnist, and you were deeply influenced by someone named Anne Landers, who I'm not sure all of our listeners of a certain age you have ever even heard of. Tell me about that column, how you grew up on it,

and why you decided to kind of twist it into a modern version. Well, Anne Landers was Anne Landers. Epi Louter, I think, was her original name? And she created the kind of mid-century modern advice column or took it out of the Yiddish press

and put it into the mainstream press. And she used to be one of the most famous women of famous human beings in America. Her column ran in a couple of thousand or 1,500 newspapers all over the country. Amazing to think about that now. It is amazing to think about that now. What was the kind of advice she'd give? What were the issues?

Whether the toilet paper should go under or over the roll. I have thoughts on that. She had many columns on that because a lot of people have thoughts on that. I'm an over person myself. Interesting. Infidelity relationships. She tackled homosexuality at a time. When Main Daily Newspers wouldn't touch it?

Ineptly, as I think a lot of people did at the time. You have to judge her by the moment. And you were reading this ironically or straight up? Or how so? My grandfather worked for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Star to deceased newspapers. He was a sports writer. And so, you know, when I was a little kid,

there were three or four or five papers in the house every day. And advice columns were this tantalizing peak into adult relationships and into marriages. So you followed in her footsteps in a kind of slightly cockied way. Yes. And it started Savage Love, your column in 1991. What were you doing before that? I was slightly cockied myself, but in a very different way.

I have a degree in theater from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I moved to West Berlin with a boyfriend and got into English language theater there, came back to the States with him, and what ended up happening was I met Tim Kack, who was the founder of The Onion, co-founder. And he was moving to Seattle to start an Alt Weekly, and I said, oh, you should have an advice column because everybody reads those. You can't.

The Alt Weekly is? The Stranger. And I said, have an advice column. Everybody reads those. And he said, great advice. Would you write the advice column? And how did you conceive of it? How did you figure it out?

Or did you just feel completely liberated to do whatever the hell you wanted right away? Well, it was very liberating because the joke became, I was going to write a sex advice column for straight people, and I was going to treat straight people with the same contempt that heterosexual advice columnist had always treated gay people with when gay people would, you know, write to them, an advice column like Anne Landers, and they would sort of hold a gay person's questions with tongs and wrinkle their

nose and say, this is very sad that you're gay and your poor mother must have broken her heart. And what happened was straight people had never been treated this way in print before. They loved it. And then real questions started pouring in. And within six months, this joke stunt advice column became a real one. How are the questions changed since you first began? And 1991 and now you're in 2016. And how does that reflect the change in gay life in this country? When I started the column in 1991, there was no Google and there was no real internet access.

And so a lot of the questions were, what's a butt plug? And butt plug has a wiki page now. And anybody you can get online to send me an email to ask me what a butt plug is can find the wiki page for it. And you can order 16 different kinds on Amazon. Exactly. You don't get those questions anymore. And that was half the mail. And those questions were easy to answer.

I could write a what's a butt plug column in my sleep. And I did sometimes. Who can't? It was hung over. Exactly. Fair enough. There's one every other week in the New Yorker, I believe. And so the column now is harder to write because every question is really situational ethics.

I became an ethicist after a while. Here's what I did. Here's what they did. Here's the situation we're in. Who's right? Who's wrong? What should we do? And those questions are so much harder to answer.

So you went from being information, please, to Montane. Yes. How have you changed over the course of since 1991 when your column began? You've gotten criticized here and there by feminists and trans people and all the rest. Have your point of view changed at all on some of these issues? Or are you getting attacked once in a while because people are kind of too sensitive about you? You joke around. Well, I've certainly gotten things wrong.

The first time I mentioned the clitoris in the column, I put it in the wrong place. Where did you put it? Turns out it's not on the soft palate, which is where mine is, and I just thought that's where everyone's was. I thought, you know, I was a gay, callow, 26-year-old gay guy who had stopped thinking about women's anatomy when I was 13 years old and decided to opt out. And I put it at the inside the vaginal canal, at the top of the vaginal canal, like some sort of joy buzzer. I've always said that the columns is much in education for me as it is for my readers. I learned things, too, and I learn things from them. I now know where the clitoris is.

I didn't know that when I started writing the column. Mazel tov. I know more about gender. I know more about trans issues than I did when I first started writing the column. There's a great flattening, though, that the Internet has created. It used to be you'd write a weekly column or a daily column, like a Royco column, and then it would disappear. And the only way to find that column would be to go and dig it out of a microfiche file and surface it. And now a column you wrote 20 years ago is presented on the online version of your paper, alongside ads that are for right now.

and it looks like you wrote it right now. And it can be circulated as if this is what you currently think and currently believe and as if you've learned nothing since 1995. We promised each other that the name Donald Trump wouldn't come up at least in the first 10 minutes. No, no, no, now we have to break it. What is your sense of Donald Trump's view of gay rights, marriage equality, and all the rest? Because it has wavered radically over the decades. There's what he has said.

There's what he has done. Everyone that he is appointed to his cabinet, everyone that he has tapped for a role in his administration, is a raving anti-LGB bigot. Everyone that he has pledged to appoint to the Supreme Court, all of the names that he floated months and months and months ago, are anti-LGB civil equality. Donald Trump is a danger and a threat and an enemy to the queer community period.

So this begins with his vice. President. Because of Mike Pence, who supports wanted money moved out of HIV prevention and into conversion therapy, wanted to electrocute the gay out of people rather than educate people about how they can protect themselves from HIV. Mike Pence, who backed in Indiana a disastrous law that cost Indiana millions and millions of dollars and jobs, legalizing discrimination against LGBT people, if you could point to your sincerely held religious beliefs. Basically the same thing that cost McCrory his job as governor in North Carolina. Carolina was not an issue for Donald Trump.

You know, in 2003, you pulled one of the great internet stunts of all time. Rick Santorum had made some, let's just say, offensive remarks about gay people. And you asked your audience to come up with an unsavory definition for the senator's name. And suddenly when you went on Google and plugged in Santorum. There's always a risk of Santorum when you're plugging something. There is. There is. And the definition for Santorum.

as was played out on John Stewart's show in a number of times, was a very interesting fluid. So let's just leave it at that. And it was pretty hilarious if you weren't Rick Centorum. Your readers wanted you to pull a similar stunt on Donald Trump. You decided not to. How come? Well, Trump is much more malevolent and much more sinister.

And I think much less comic a figure, much more ridiculous a human being in some ways. I'm all for mocking Trump, but I just haven't been feeling it myself and haven't been able to quite get there with a redefinition. But people have been asking, after the Santorum thing, people wanted me to redefine Ann Coulter's name, Antonin Scalia's name, Mitt Romney's name, everybody's name. And I didn't want to live in a world where I couldn't have sex without invoking every single knuckle-dragging repulings. Republican bigot in the world, so I've avoided it. You've got a podcast, obviously, and in the first episode, after the election, you talked about how the future of the Democratic Party rests with America's cities. Can you explain that?

And isn't that indicate that we are just even more divided than we even possibly imagine? After the 2004 election, the strangers, editors wrote an issue that we called the Urban Archipelago, because I would always look at the map after an election listening to people talk about red states and And I would look at the map broken down by precincts, and there is no such thing as a blue state. There are red states with big blue cities. Illinois is mostly red. Chicago and Cook County flip the state. Washington state, which everyone talks about being reliably blue, where we passed an increase in the minimum wage this year, where we reelected our Democratic governor and a Democratic senator, where we passed a massive transit bill, is mostly red.

Seattle King County makes the state turns the state blue. So we always felt that the Democrats need to embrace that they are the party of the cities, the party of urban America, and organize in urban America. So some people are going to argue that that kind of polarization and encouraging that kind of polarization, or maybe you're just saying we're reconciling ourselves to a reality, helped lead to Trump's election in the first place. And how do you react to that argument? These are just the facts on the ground that Dems take a state when cities turn out to vote. and cities to turn out to vote need to have their voters registered. They need to have Democrats proposing programs that help to build the cities and that benefit people in the cities.

And those programs are also going to benefit people in the exurbs and in the suburbs and in rural areas, whether they realize it or not or can recognize it or not. But you don't win this country. Democrats don't win national elections without the cities turning out in a huge way. And they need to motivate the cities and run toward the cities in the same way that Republicans run toward rural areas and people who identify with them wherever they might live.

You're associated with identity politics to some degree or another, and yet I just read an interview, it was a debate about President Obama's legacy in which Andrew Sullivan says that identity politics are ruining American dialogue. I mean, this is somebody

who came out for gay marriage in the New Republic years before this was a mainstream issue, anywhere near a mainstream issue. He's dead. deeply concerned with that. How do you view it? I don't even know how to speak to it. People are who they are and people have identities and some people are singled out for discrimination and for violence, for economic violence

in our culture, in our society, by their identities. And so there is going to be some form of identity politics. You know, someone who can't get a job because she's trans, somebody whose house is vandalized because they're an African-American family living somewhere where some jerks think African-American family shouldn't be allowed to live. Their identities are sort of central to their oppression

and how do you discuss remedying that oppression without acknowledging that their identities factor into that and are the focus of the bigots who are attacking them. So there's some identity politics that is unavoidable. and that we need and that that must be addressed. My problem with identity politics, and I said this on the Strangers Blabbermouth podcast the day after the election, is that a lot of what's

come from the left is around people's missteps. You use the wrong pronoun. You used the wrong word. You said the wrong thing. You, you know, you committed a microaggression. And now we have macroaggressions to worry about for a while. But you committed this microaggression. And there would there would be this leap to a presumption of maliciousness. You think it's an unforgiving atmosphere? Yeah, this leap to a presumption of maliciousness, as opposed to assuming ignorance and presuming someone's good intention and then dialoguing with them.

Is that exacerbated by Twitter and social media? Oh, God, yes. Twitter, I'm addicted to it. Literally, it's the last thing I look at every night in bed before I fall asleep, and the first thing I look at every morning on the way to the bathroom. And as I do it, I'm like, why am I putting this needle in my arm? And I don't understand why you do it. I get hit on this all the time.

I'm not on it, and yet I read it. I peek over the hedge, as it were. But I just know if I went on it. It would just be a time suck. It is. Now, I've got to close with a question that is more eternal than politics itself, and that's monogamy. Your views of monocominy are flexible, I'd say, and they're not dogmatic. And they have to do with the future of relationships and, and, you know,

marriage itself, you're now married guy. How do you view monogamy? Is it impossible? I think we can have stable, long-term committed relationships, or we can have completely faultlessly, flawlessly monogamous ones, but not both. And I say this not to encourage everyone to be monogamish, which is a coin, term my coin, or to have open or polyamorous relationships. I say this also to people who want monogamy. As I've said for years, we talk about monogamy the way we talk about virginity, that you're monogamous until you have sex with someone else, and then you busted your monogamy, hymen, and it's over. And we should talk about monogamy the way we talk about sobriety, that you are sober, and then you fall off the monogamy wagon,

and you can monogamous back up, you can sober back up, you can get back on that wagon. But if we say that if somebody cheats, you got to go, or if somebody cheats, it's over. If somebody cheat, they didn't really love you. We are writing death sentences for our marriages before we've even entered into them. And that's crazy. So I don't say everything I say about monogamy to talk everybody out of monogamy. I say all of this so that people who want monogamy, who've made monogamous commitments, who then have made a mistake or their partners have made a mistake, can re-up and recommit to that monogamous ideal. But we are sacrificing real relationships, real marriages, stability for real children on the altar of the monogamous ideal and monogamous perfection. And we need to flip it.

And that should be the understanding going into the relationship. Absolutely. The conversation that my husband and I had, we were monogamous for years when we first got together. How long are you together? 22 years. And monogamous when we had kids or our child when we adopted. And he was Mr. monogamy and very, very, very attached to the monogamous ideal. And I wouldn't have a kid with them. I said, you know, not, you have to be non-monogamous to have a kid with me, but if the rule is, if I cheat or you cheat, it's over, I'm not having a kid with you because that kid is going to have a broken home handed to him or her. And how hard was that for him to accept? What we agreed to was not, you know, cheating's no

big deal and you can't be upset and anything goes. What we agreed to was we would default to trying to work through this and get through it and survive it. As a principle of being together. Right. And that, you know, you have to just. and infidelity on a case-by-case basis. Had sex with your sister on your wedding night? Iffy. You probably not a betrayal. You can get past.

25 years into a marriage where there are kids and property and family and history together and sex isn't the most important or most defining aspect of your intimacy or your connection anymore. Maybe that can be gotten past. I got to tell you, I grew up with Anne Landers, and I never heard that advice. Anne Landers ended up getting divorced because her husband had an affair. There you go. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. Dan Savage is the author of the Savage Love column and many books, and he hosts a podcast. They just posted episode 533. All that information is at New YorkerRadio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and in a minute, the insatiably curious Ian Frazier pokes his head into an abandoned factory

in the middle of an industrial stretch of New Jersey and finds there an indoor farm growing lettuce by the ton. That's in a minute. Come on in. Good to see you, David. Good to see you. So you're working on a piece?

Yeah. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Jonathan Blitzer writes a lot about Latin America and Spain. And he's got a piece coming out in the magazine about immigrants deported back to El Salvador. But Jonathan's got his hands on all kinds of things, and he always knows some really interesting stuff. And you have a piece coming for us very soon, I know. But even so, you're always good at telling me what you're up to and what you're reading

and so on. What have you been looking at, listening to, reading these days? Well, I know, David, that you're not on Twitter. You're wrong. You're completely and utterly wrong, but I lurk there like one of those creepy people in a horror movie, just reading and not quite taking part in the horror movie. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, I'm fully hooked in, and when I'm not outright shrieking, I'm looking at the Twitter feed of Robbie Albemadine. He's a novelist. Written several highly acclaimed novels, but his Twitter feed has actually become a kind of real cult hub for people like me who need some sort of salve on Twitter these days. And what he does

is he just includes photos and images of great works of art that sort of strike his fancy. And he has a very interesting sensibility and interesting eyes. Sometimes he organizes these things by theme. So let me get this straight. To feel better about the world in all its kind of fall in politics, you go on a Twitter feed and he's forming a kind of museum of joy for you. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's amazing to meet all of these people who are also ardent followers of Robbie's Twitter feed. No commentary. Just works of art. All just images. In fact, you know, here he's got one of Goya's dark paintings of Saturn consuming as... Just to be clear, this is Saturn consuming his child, which is not making me feel peaceful and restful. Well, sometimes they're thematically appropriate, but at least...

But there are some lighter ones somewhere down there. You're scrolling and you're scrolling. I'm looking desperately. When you get to a seascape, let me know. Exactly. You know, I've actually talked to art critics and others who follow him and consider his Twitter feeder work of art in its own right. I mean, he really, he does select images with like a very kind of interesting curatorial eye. And so when you're going to like a real physical museum or reading up on art these days, what else are you involving yourself in?

Well, there is an artist in particular who I've been looking at, obviously a well-known guy, Salvador Dali, who has a cookbook. that he created in the early 1970s, he annotated, illustrated a cookbook that he and his wife, Gala, assembled from a bunch of different high-end French restaurants at the time. And what he's done is... It's called The Dinners of Gala.

And this is incredible book by Tashan. Tashan has just brought it out. Yeah, they've reissued it after all of these years. Extremely gold cover. Yeah, it's flashy and the usual... Surrealist lobsters on the cover. Yeah, exactly. You know, there are 136 restaurants.

recipes in this book. And he divides them into chapters. And there's a chapter called... Is he supposed to cook any? These are all kind of jokes. I think they're, these are real things. I mean, they're higher end than I'd ever be capable of cooking. And in fact, surreality in the kitchen is sort of how I, how I tend to roll with my George Foreman at home. Everything's melting off the plate for me. But some of these things are actually quite funny and bizarre and kind of lured. Oh my God. So these are like dancing worms? Yeah, he's... flying off the side of what looks like my mother's jello mold, but with more blood than usual. Blood everywhere.

I can't tell you how appetizing this looks. And with people's heads chopped off. Yeah, there's some Bosch, there's some Bosch sides, you know, some Bosch garnishes here. Yeah. You're having a hard time these days, Jonathan. I'm really struggling. Yeah, yeah, no, I can see that. What are you listening to to make you feel better?

Well, the one thing that has really kind of transported me away from all of this these days is a great Mexican folklorist. named Agustin Lara. And Lara, you know, just has these sort of delightful boleros and ballads, all of these sort of love songs and kind of tongue-in-cheek tangos and Paso Doubles. We're going to hear one song that I've always kind of held dear. It's called Farolito. Farolito is a diminutive way of saying street lamp. And so it's a little homage to a street lamp at the corner of the street,

which Agostin Lara loves because it struggles so mightily to keep this time. little street lit at night and essentially fails. It's lovely. You're going to survive, you're going to be all right, I'm going to you're going to your door to

It's lovely. You're going to survive? You're going to be all right? I'm a little worried about you all in this way. I appreciate your concern, David. I'm trying my best over here. It's going to be okay. Jonathan, thank you.

Thanks, too. Jonathan Blitzer with a song. The Salvador Dali Cookbook was just republished by Tashin, and you can find Robbie Almadine's Twitter feed at New Yorkeradio.org. Before we go today, we're going to take a little trip. Well, I'm Ian Frazier, and we're going to 400,000. Ferry Street in Newark, New Jersey. Is this the turn?

The New Yorkers Ian Frazier is kind of an explorer. He's reported from the Rust Belt, from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and Siberia. And God knows where else. But today, he's just going a few miles from home. Well, I like to walk around. I walk all over wherever it is. I happen to find myself.

But I live in suburban New Jersey. and from time to time I'll walk down into Newark. It's seven miles or something from my house and just walk around and look at stuff. You'll see abandoned buildings or buildings that are just nothing's happening there, and you wonder about them. There's so many of them. And when I heard that there was one of these buildings

was going to be turned into a vertical farm that is a farm that uses space vertically, just the way apartment buildings use space. That fascinated me. And it is different. It's different from rooftop farms. It's different from growing in an abandoned lot. Thanks for coming down.

I hope you're coming down anyway. No, it's fine. You're important. And besides, I like to see you. Oh, I like to see you too. That said, Harwood. He's an agricultural inventor. He's been an agricultural inventor for a long time.

I'm the chief science officer at Aero Farms. I invented the majority of the equipment that we're currently using in this facility to grow baby leafy greens. I admire inventors. I'm from Ohio. The Wright brothers are from Ohio. And Ohio actually has a museum of inventors. It has a Hall of Fame of Inventors. My father was an inventor.

He worked on plastics for Standard Oil of Ohio. What I admired about Ed Harwood was when I first looked at his grow table. It looked to me like the original Wright Brothers plane. And, you know, it's just, I think, just canvas and wood. And what they did with that is just staggering to me. And the name of the plane is the flyer. I think that's like the most beautiful name. Like, flyer.

That's like Ohio, you know. We keep it simple. And ingenious. So I was trying to remember, you know, when was the aha, when all they were, right? When does the aha happen? Yeah. Yeah, so Travis and I always had lunch at Wegmans in the balcony up above. Wegmans is an East Coast grocery store chain.

You can see the produce department. And Ed Harwood, he often had lunch there with his colleague, Travis. while they were working on a plan for growing lettuce indoors. That's the real aha that happened at that particular time, right? So we're thinking about growing heads. At first, they were talking about just heads of lettuce. And we're looking at a head of lettuce, one pound, one dollar. And then we see a bag of lettuce, and it's less than a pound in the bag,

and it's like $8, $9. It doesn't take a whole lot of difference there to tell you, don't want to be growing heads. That was a pretty big aha for us because then we switched totally. We stopped working on that whole other project and moved to this. So they decided that the crop they would grow would be baby salad greens, and the method they chose was aeroponics. This does not use soil.

Aeroponics nourishes and waters plants by means of a mist, a sprays a mist on the roots. So what do you put the plants in? Ed also had to invent a growing meat. medium. And that medium is a piece of cloth. But the cloth, you went to fabric stores over and over and over, and you're just trying. And the Joanne Fabrics ladies were really helpful, except for, yes. And they would say, so what color do you want and what pattern do you want?

And they would be very frustrated with that whole thing. But I tried just about everything. I mean, that's the fabric, right? Yes. It's a fleece, basically. Yes. The seeds are put on this fleece. They germinate.

Their roots go through and below the fleece, where they are available to be misted. And the leaves grow above the fleece, which holds the plant in place and holds it upright. So let's see. Let's start down. Let's just quickly walk down. So once he had the technology down,

he built a grow table 100 feet long in an abandoned canoe factory. And his grow table worked very well with very little water and no soil, and it was extremely portable. I mean, that's a key thing for vertical farming. It has to be light enough that you can stack the trays one on top of another. So what we have in this vertical farm, the grow tables are about 80 feet long, and they're stacked seven beds high, and they are growing these baby salad greens.

And if you look in, there are armies and armies of business. baby solid greens. It looks kind of like a lit up high rise with veins of green running through in between the layers of lights. From a distance, it's the top of a cruise ship, right? All lit up at night or whatever. So there's a big tank reservoir that sits underneath the machine and we manage the nutrient solution in its BH and a bunch of other things in it to make sure that it's one.

what the plants want. So from the pumps, it goes down... Everything about the plants, everything that's important to their growth. Water, nutrients, light, are controlled and monitored by computer algorithms, which adjust everything minutely. At one point they told me it was like 170,000 data points is what they're following. Because of this intense focus of technology on these humble greens, they can go from seed to harvest in 18 days.

In that sense, it's pretty simple. What's actually going on is a little bit more complex. I don't think anybody imagines vertical farming as replacing conventional agriculture, but it is an interesting accompaniment to it. Over the long haul, it appears that it will be more environmentally friendly than growing in a field.

In the first place, it uses a tiny amount of the water. that conventional agriculture uses. In the second place, you can put this farm anywhere, which means that you do not have to drive these salad greens for days and days to reach the market. They use LED lights, and LED lights, it is a big expense, but the cost of LED lights goes down all the time, the efficiency of LED lights goes up all the time,

and it looks as if this is going to be a very practical way of providing light to the growing plants. And about 5% of the physical mass of the plants is carbon, and the carbon comes from the air. It comes out of the air, and it's in the supermarket. Right. Tell me what the CO2 problem was, because you told me that when you were first doing it,

and the plants were not working out that well, you wondered, wait a minute, how much CO2 are they getting? Yes. So I was growing in the basement of the canoe factory. And I did not have any air coming in because I was trying to save money on heating the building and the rest of that. So I had it pretty well sealed up. Okay. So that CO2 is depleted in that room as a result of the plants. And without any more coming back in, that level is going to go way down. So outdoors, we have about 400 ppm of CO2.

too. And, yes, but I had driven it down to 50 ppm. At 50 ppm, there's not enough carbon to make more plant. So I had these little tiny plants and they would just stay that way. They would not grow like anybody else's plants that I saw. And here we take it to about a thousand ppm. Wow. So you do enrich here. Yes. We have it delivered by companies that make the CO2 from the air. So, you know, we have kind of have this whole cycle going, right? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not a problem. Anybody thinks, well, we got not enough CO2, you know? And the carbon, does it only come from the air?

Yes. Oh, yeah. So if you're taking a million pounds out of here, you're taking 50,000 pounds of carbon that was in the air. Yes. To me is kind of incredible. And that we're eating carbon that comes out of the air and it's in the supermarket. Ed Harwood had an idea to do this.

without anybody saying, you know, Ed, we need you to do this. He was just thinking about how could you solve this problem of growing plants indoors with the minimum amount of water in a way that could fit inside a building. And it was just a problem that he set himself and actually solved. He pulls this plant out of, kind of out of thin air. He did something that was close to magic. just out of the love of doing it, really.

And then it can be translated into this factory in Newark where factories came and went. And to me, there's an elegance about that. What would you say is your most notable invention, or what invention are you proudest of? Well, I'm very proud of figuring out how to grow in cloth. But there's sort of like a runner-up. I thought that we should be able to feed calves automatically.

So this is my very first one, all right? And I took a toilet in all the parts of a toilet to be able to automatically feed the calves. Okay, so I would fill up the toilet bowl with milk. All right, I had the plunger, so you go to the calf's bucket and you push the plunger, okay, and all of that's on a wagon. So it's very simple stuff, okay? But in a way, those are the things that make you curious.

And if you get rewarded slightly from doing it, then you continue to do these, you know, you continue to think that way, I guess. Did that calf feeder work out? I mean, was it something you had? No one was pleased with me going around outside and, you know, inside of everybody in Fort Collins with a toilet feeding cabs. Okay, fine, but figure out some other word configuration. Yeah, much less elegant than what you've done. inventor Ed Harwood of Arrow Farms talking with Ian Frazier. Fraser's written for The New Yorker for more than 40 years, and not long ago, he published a great collection of his reporting called Hogs Wild.

I'm David Remnick, and we're done for today. Thanks for joining us, and I hope you'll join us next week. Until then, you can stay in touch on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.